Relocation, relocation, as they say in the witness protection programme. And what a great idea for a drama the witness protection programme is! Channel 4’s new seven parter, Cape Wrath, stretches credibility a little by relocating everybody to the same housing estate, but still . . . dramatically, you’ve got to love the possibilities for intrigue. When most of us move home we have no idea who our neighbours will turn out to be; in Meadowlands you also have no idea who they used to be. No wonder Danny Brogan, the failed barman played by David Morrissey, is half filled with hope, and half with fear, when he introduces his family to their new life.

Last night’s feature-length opener should have been as heady as the first episode of The Prisoner in which Patrick McGoohan was involuntarily relocated to The Village. It could have been as funny as waking up with Truman Burbank in The Truman Showor as weird as Agent Cooper’s arrival in Twin Peaks. Given its title, we might have hoped for the kind of scary thrills provided by the Bowden family’s sojourn in Cape Fear. And it was not as if the writer Robert Murphy and director Duane Clark did not reference the above masterpieces – you may throw Wisteria Lane, Peyton Place and Stepford into the mix – but Meadowlands remained about as heady, funny, weird, creepy and so on as Brookside Close.

Danny’s new neighbours were odd without being interesting. Brenda Ogilvie was the over-the-top one, a one-woman welcoming committee, whose distress at the ravages time had inflicted on her body had warped into manic enthusiasm for her daughter Jezebel’s looks. If you thought Brenda was OTT, you had to meet Jez, a ten-tonne baby doll who fancied herself irresistible to men. So the Ogilvies were the comedy family. The Yorks were the dull couple, he a dishy but bland doctor, she a desperate housewife. Meadowlands also boasted not one but three psychos, a brutish copper, a taciturn villain from Danny’s past, who came and went like an apparition in Lost, and a Neanderthal handyman named Jack.

Actually, Jack, played by Tom Hardy, was one of the better turns and had one of a workaday script’s better lines: “I killed a woman but it was an accident. I meant to keep her alive.” God’s dubious gift to women, he was proving a very handy man both to the doctor’s wife and Danny’s nubile daughter, Zoe. They would still be fighting over him next week, had Danny not slaughtered him at the end of last night’s opener.

Until the homicide, Danny had seemed a mild enough bloke, but that is the way men are on TV these days: taciturn, conventional, well-dressed and then violent nutters when they think they are in the right about something. A properly directed Morrissey could easily have played Danny as someone with a bit of madness about him – remember his Ripley Holden in Blackpool? – but here he was consigned to play Danny as plain Mr Everyman. Lucy Cohu, excellent as Princess Margaret a year or so back, was his uptight, randy wife. Felicity Jones, charming in Northanger Abbey, was Zoe, the rebellious, randy daughter. Harry Treadwell played her disturbed, cross-dressing, yet randy twin. Cape Wrath was full of great actors and not one great character. You might decide it’s worth staying with, but you probably thought that about the last show that cooped strangers up in an artificial community – and how boring did Big Brother 8 turn out to be?

Meadowlands could have done with James May as a resident. Instead he has been relocated from Top Gear to James May’s 20th Century (BBC Two) where he is entrusted with explaining the rise of the machines. He is a fascinating character who talks in the cadences of old-fangled Blue Peter presenters (before they started defrauding kids), wears a leather blazer and, despite being in his early or possibly late seventies, boasts long flyaway hair that could have last night helped him to illustrate the theory of flight. I assumed that this show, which came like a Twix in a double pack, had somehow fallen out of CBBC’s schedules but the end credits revealed that it was an Open University production. What happened to northern scientists and whiteboards? And are they just giving away degrees these days?

Out of the box

The BBC 10 O’Clock News was crowded on Monday night, dealing with the bomb plotters’ convictions, John Simpson’s interview with General Petraeus and the Forest of Dean man locked up in a shed. Still, it was a pity that there was no room for the BBC’s first ever fine from Ofcom for the Blue Peter scam.

How heartwarming to hear Alastair Campbell being almost cordial to John Humphrys on Today this week. In 1997 Campbell accompanied the PM to his infamous “I’m a pretty straight kinda guy” appearance on Humphrys’ On the Record. The interview over, Campbell was, he now admits, “probably a bit too rude” to Humph. “But,” he excuses himself in his diaries, “he was so up himself it was hard not to be.”

andrew.billen@thetimes.co.uk

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